Monday, June 7, 2010

Typology of Anonymous Architecture

'buildings where anonymity is accepted to be the style'

Since 1959 married couple, Bernd and Hilla Becher have photographed the industrial architecture of Western Europe. Arranged in grids or as a sequence of monographs 'to make families of objects' or 'to create families of motifs' they invited examination of the similarities and differences in structure and appearance.

Everybody who collects something groups, whether you collect beer mugs or butterflies. ... Or stamps, for instance: you collect them for countries, colors, images, time. [Likewise] you can also group these very difficult to understand industrial buildings. -- Hilla Becher

Artist Idris Khan (in)famously produced his own homage to the Becher's, appropriating their images in all-encompassing composites consolidating them into single ‘super-images’: